Qatar’s Doha Tower, a spiked cylinder that glows orange at night, won an award when finished in 2012 amid a Gulf-wide property boom, but today about half of its 46 floors are empty.The office tower, now a familiar part of the capital’s high-rise skyline, has run foul of what real estate brokers, bankers and analysts say is an oversupplied Qatar property market ahead of the 2022 World Cup that mirrors a real estate downturn in the wider Gulf region after a drop in oil prices.Qatar has the added… Source link

Plans to liquidate China’s thousands of “zombie” companies are underway in several of its provinces, according to state media, as the government moves towards an aggressive target of eliminating such firms by 2020. In December, the Chinese government set a goal of closing zombie state-owned enterprises by the end of 2020. On February 1, it was reported in Economic Information Daily, a newspaper owned by the Xinhua News Agency, that various arms of government, including the regional authorities and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC – the body…

There are many ways to measure the bursting of the cryptocurrency bubble last year: Bitcoin was down 80 per cent from its peak; over 900 digital tokens became worthless; the vaporised value of digital assets exceeded US$600 billion. Some metrics are more personal and show the pain felt by those on the ground who helped inflate the bubble. Over the past year Michael Zhang, a 26-year-old telecommunications engineer based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, put 40,000 yuan (US$5,964) into cryptocurrencies, only to see his investment shrink to one…

Foreign companies in Asia are deeply embedded in China’s industry supply chains, making the self-reliance call from Chinese President Xi Jinping both difficult and costly, according to Shaun Roache, Asia-Pacific chief economist for S&P Global Ratings. The problem is that a large proportion of suppliers in China’s technology industry are foreign based, often with headquarters in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the United States. Thus far, according to Roache, the push for self reliance has come up against the reality that the tech industry is heavily dependent on global component…

As goes January, so goes the year? If that’s the case, Chinese yuan strength in the early weeks of this year should mean a strong performance versus the US dollar in 2019 as a whole. But such has been the pace of this yuan rise, investors might be disinclined to chase the move from current levels. Such a cautionary approach might well be justified. Indeed, some likely drivers of the yuan’s early January rise may prove short-lived. Investors who are already “on the trade” will be mindful of managing their…

Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a speech last week that the country was “steadily widening the opening up” of its financial industry. For China watchers, steadily was the key word. Almost exactly a year after the country announced historic plans to ease local ownership rules and entry barriers to what’s now a US$45 trillion industry, the pace of change has been closer to a crawl than a sprint. While Xi signalled that China’s opening remains on track despite the country’s trade war with America, he also made it clear…